Senior Process Engineering Manager

Without; Pune District; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 5,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Without is building India’s first commercial-scale MLP recycling facility in Pune and seeks a Chief Plant Process Engineer to lead from pilot learnings to a fully running plant. You will own equipment selection, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fail-safe operations, bridging 100 kg pilot success to tens of tonnes in production, while ensuring safety and reliability.

You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to translate process fundamentals into a robust, scalable plant, with a focus on

Qualifications

• Experience translating pilot data to commercial scale.
• Strong understanding of process controls, safety philosophies, and interlocks.
• Experience in plant design, commissioning and operations.

Responsibilities

• Own the journey from pilot to commercial plant, including equipment selection and commissioning.
• Lead troubleshooting during commissioning and operations, driving practical fixes.
• Define fail-safe strategies, risk assessments, and alarm rationalisation for safe plant running.
• Coordinate with EPC partners and vendors to ensure design aligns with pilot intent.

Skills

Pilot-to-Commercial experience

Troubleshooting mindset

Fail-Safe thinking

EPC & vendor management

CFD & process simulation

Education

B.Tech/B.Tech in Chemical Engineering or Mechanical/Process Engineering

Tools

PFDs & P&IDs

CFD

Process simulation

Job description

We are looking for mission-driven, grounded folks to add to our equation.

Let's Reimagine Waste Together

Chief Plant Process Engineer

What if your next plant wasn’t just built – but built to change an industry?

At Without®, we’ve proven we can turn “unrecyclable” plastic into premium materials at pilot scale. Now we’re building India’s first commercial-scale MLP recycling facility – and we need someone who can take us from pilot learnings to commercial reality.

This isn’t drawing P&IDs in isolation. It’s owning the entire journey – equipment selection, mechanical practicality, commissioning, troubleshooting, and fail-safe operations. You’ll translate what we’ve learned at pilot into a plant that actually runs.

If you’ve taken processes from paper to production – and stayed to fix what broke – we should talk.

• Experience: 6-12 years in process engineering, with hands-on exposure to plant design, commissioning, and operations – ideally in chemicals, polymers, or recycling.
• Education: B.Tech/M.Tech in Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or Process Engineering.
• Pilot-to-Commercial Experience: You’ve scaled processes from pilot to commercial. You understand that what works at 100kg behaves differently at 10 tonnes – and you know how to bridge that gap.
• Process Fundamentals: Deep fluency in PFDs, P&IDs, mass/energy balances, process narratives, and control philosophies. You don’t just draw diagrams – you defend every line.
• Equipment & Mechanical Sense: You select the right equipment (reactors, vessels, heat exchangers, pumps, compressors, filters, dryers) and understand how it actually behaves – clearances, wear, vibration, sealing, thermal expansion, maintenance access. You can guide mechanical design inputs: nozzle orientation, internals, agitation, baffles, metallurgy selection, and corrosion allowance.
• Troubleshooting Mindset: You don’t hand off P&IDs and disappear. You stay through commissioning and operations, lead root cause investigations for trips and failures, and build practical fixes – instrument changes, control modifications, interlocks, equipment tweaks.
• Fail-Safe Thinking: You predict failure scenarios: “what fails, what happens next, what protects us?” You drive HAZOP, relief/venting philosophy, ESD/interlocks, and alarms rationalisation. Learnings become engineering safeguards, not just reports.
• EPC & Vendor Management: You evaluate and select EPC partners and critical vendors. You hold them accountable on datasheets, sizing, GA drawings, and FAT/SAT readiness – without micromanaging. You ensure design aligns with pilot intent and commercial reliability.
• Bonus – Simulation & CFD: Experience with process simulation (steady-state/dynamic) for scale-up, equipment sizing, and debottlenecking. Working knowledge of CFD for reactor/mixing performance, dead zones, and distribution risks.
• Startup Mentality: Comfortable with ambiguity, resource constraints, and building from scratch.
• Purpose-Driven: You want to build something that matters – not just another plant.
• Location: Willing to spend considerable time in Pune, India – this is not a remote role.

Without®is not just another social enterprise or non-profit or start-up. We are an amalgamation of all that and a lot more.

Our why, our values, our guiding principles and our mission are absolute pillars in our journey to make deep, meaningful impact. We have just launched a new brand and our first product, and are trying to build on that.

Right now, we are a small but passionate team, so our work culture is evolving as we speak. We don’t believe in hierarchy and are attempting to build an environment of self-management.

We believe the following traits are currently fuelling our evolution:

pACE

We know we are moving quickly, but it still feels too slow. We want to move faster. We want to compress many years of research into one. But at the same time, we don’t want to break things along the way. Help us find our pace.

OUTCOME

We are outcome-focused. By that we mean it doesn’t really matter how many hours you work, it’s what you do with those hours that matters. Work hours are flexible. Our outcomes, not as much.

We are super transparent. There’s no point in sweeping conflicts under a rug. We don’t have much to hide from each other and are consistently evaluating our work, our feelings and our differences. We are our biggest critics.

grounded

No task is too small or too big for any of us to do. At the same time, we play to our strengths, optimising for the greater goal we are seeking to achieve, all the while keeping our minds open to diverse perspectives.